the many benefits of coconut oil

I love coconut oil. I use it for basically everything: cooking, moisturizing my cuticles, homemade sugar scrubs, removing fake eyelashes that refused to release from my eyelids, etc. The benefits of coconut oil are pretty amazing. I'd like to think the benefits of coconut oil are old news, but somehow the age-old advice that low-fat diets are the best thing out there lives on.

I started heavily pushing it on everyone that would listen to me {my mom} after I read about coconut oil's affect on Alzheimer's disease a couple of years ago. Dr. Mary Newport wrote a remarkable {and inspiring} report about her husband, who suffers from Alzheimer's. It's fairly long, but I highly recommend it. In [very] short, coconut oil is a medium chain triglyceride oil, which the body digests differently than your standard fat. The liver then converts it to ketones. The ingestion of coconut oil leads to circulating ketone bodies, available to the brain as energy. It also results in increased cerebral blood flow. After 37 days of coconut oil, Dr. Newport's husband exhibited drastic improvements in function, turning me into a believer and a preacher of the benefits. I cook with it as often as possible, and the protein powder we make our shakes with contains coconut fat. If I'm making a regular smoothie, I'll try to throw a spoonful of coconut oil in there if I can remember. In my book, you're never too young to start preventative measures. {I may have been upset at my 19th birthday over aging, so...} So run out to Trader Joe's if you have one, or Village Health Market if you're here in Tampa, and grab some expeller pressed organic coconut oil.